Henry attended Sydney Boys High School until he was 15 then went to Hazelbrook in the Blue Mountains where he worked for seven years on road contracting and in the family orchard. When his brother Charles enrolled in medicine at the University of Sydney, Henry joined him. They graduated together in 1906.

After a stint at the Queen Victoria Homes for Consumptives at Wentworth Falls and Thirlmere, Henry joined the Public Service in June 1907 and was resident medical officer at the Coast (Prince Henry) Hospital until Aug 1908. In April 1909 he was appointed first medical superintendent of the Home for Consumptives, Waterfall, where he remained until 1939.

He endlessly importuned government for money to improve the sanatorium, for main electricity, finally supplied in 1925, for safer milk, for an efficient laundry. His ideal of a complete system of tuberculosis eradication and management, controlled by a divisional head within the Department of Public Health was achieved only after his retirement. He wanted early, intermediate and advanced cases placed in distinct institutions with appropriate regimes, allowances linked to the basic wage for hospitalised patients, and after-care for sufferers and their families when the patient was discharged and needing help in finding suitable employment. Henry also called inavailingly for legally controlled milk sterilization to eliminate non-pulmonary forms of tuberculosis. His dispirited annual reports on his sanatorium and his survey of sanatoria in South Australia, Victoria and New Zealand, published in 1924, upset colleagues concerned with the prestige of the profession.

In 1939 he became secretary and chief executive officer of the Carrington Centennial Hospital for Convalescents, Camden, remaining there until 1955. His hobby was gardening and, like many sanatorium doctors, he was also interested in breeding pigs.

He was survived by his second wife, and one son and two daughters by his first marriage.